Tag Archives: DIY craft

My title is from a love poem my mom wrote my father in a diorama she made him.

As I’ve told you, Valentine’s Day is special to my family. It’s special to the four of us now, but that comes over from my childhood love of the holiday. I promised you one last Valentine’s Day story and this one is a doozy. I have published it on my blog in the past, probably more than once, but it needs a refresher. Also, I have a photo of the diorama she made him.

We were able to fix the heart, but I took this photo last year before that:

And now it’s story time, followed by craft time, because apparently I need to be a preschool teacher:

The reason I love Valentine’s Day is truly an epic, movie-esque, not-quite-happy, really-downright-sad reason, but boy, did it propel a series of not sad Valentine’s Days. I don’t need the works. I don’t need a single thing. I can tell you about valentines in school – getting three carnation “Love-Grams” sent to my desk in high school (from my sister and two gay friends but that’s neither here nor there). I can tell you about my first college boyfriend and his stuffed bear and three pound bag of M&Ms that I couldn’t even look at, because I had the honest-to-goodness FLU. There are many stories to tell.

It starts with this one.

My father had passed away in July. Before he had died suddenly, he had been put on a waitlist for Cabbage Patch Dolls – specifically the ones called “Preemies.” They don’t make them like that anymore! The Valentine’s Day after he died, I was four and Lindsay was six. This was several months later, and my mom got the call from Child World ON VALENTINE’S DAY (or maybe the day before) that the two Cabbage Patch dolls he had ordered were ready for her to pick up, after all this time.

My mom was the room mother for Lindsay’s classroom and had organized a Valentine’s Day game, but instead Lindsay got really sick and missed the party. We were home later on Valentine’s Day and Lindsay was napping – burning up with a high fever. She woke up and my mom gave us valentine gifts. I remember fuzzy red monkeys that had arms you could clip on things. We got homemade valentines and then the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. Lindsay could read then, and my mom put cards on the boxes that said, “Happy Valentine’s Day, from your daddy in heaven.” It certainly felt cosmic then. It still does.

Sometimes I can open my heart a little bit, and then a bit more, and get back there again.

I’m a mom now and while my kids know I make a huge deal out of Valentine’s Day, they don’t know why..quite yet.

1 – Start by spray painting your long twigs outside in a well ventilated area. Leave the twigs to dry completely before bringing inside.

2 – Cut out small triangles from cardstock in the color of your choosing. We used gold glitter cardstock to make our triangles. These will be the tips of your arrows, so you may need to adjust the size of the triangles according to the size of your twigs.

3 – Fold each triangle in half.

4 – Glue one folded triangle to the bottom of one of your painted twigs, and then glue the matching triangle onto the other side of the bottom of your twig. This will form the point of your Cupid’s arrow.

5 – Trim down a feather to a length that you like according to the size of your twig. You will put this feather at the top of your arrow.

6 – Gently hot glue the feather in place at the top of your twig and in line with the point of your arrow.

7 – Wrap a ribbon of your choosing around the bottom of the feather to cover it completely. Secure the ribbon in the back of the arrow with hot glue.

We’ll see how well I stick to that one. Like just today, in fact. Yesterday we had a snow day. It was the perfect school storm – starting around 9:00am and tapering off around 3:00pm. It’s like the snow specifically wanted us to NOT go to school. Ok. Done. We didn’t go to school! Then last night with the freezing rain, sleet, rain, and all around ice rink of a town, we got the call that today would be a 2-hour delay. So I’m losing steam a bit. I can’t lie. Luckily, we kept busy yesterday. And how!

This project is simple. My mom works with fleece and fleece scraps so often. This is easy to make, easy to teach, and easy enough to play. Although I can always tell when I haven’t gotten enough sleep, because the kids beat me fair and square!

And I owe you two more Valentine’s Day stories, don’t I? Yes. Yes, I do. This one is a good one. As you may know from my 20 part story, Cassidy and I had a whirlwind, cross-country, summer romance and then broke up for two years. After we had found each other again, we knew pretty soon in that we had to be together, geographically too. It was a big risk and a gamble and MUCH harder than I thought it would be. Like, worlds harder. It was hard also to be away from each other. We tried to see each other at least once a month before I moved out there in April, but that was taxing financially and physically. We sometimes went months without seeing each other. And that was pretty awful until he fulfilled an old dream.

He had always wanted to fly 3,000 miles to surprise me at work, but that got messed up after our terrible breakup. So this was Relationship 2.0 and it was bigger and better than ever. It was a gloomy February day and he called me, from what I thought was California, but then I came in from lunch break at my NJ office and he was in the stairwell! The freakin’ stairwell! Commence hugging/kissing. The ultimate grand gesture. We didn’t have a lot of time, but we made it count.

And no, not by doing crafts. The above photo is just long paragraph filler! haha.. doing crafts with Cassidy. hahahaha! Anyway, the joke is on me, because now we do crafts together all the time. It’s just that we usually do them WITH the kids:

1 – Cut 3 large hearts out of 3 pieces of the fleece. Reserve a little bit of extra to cut 5 tiny hearts out of each of these colors.
2 – Cut 5 tiny hearts out of each of the other 3 pieces of fleece.
3 – Use the black marker and draw a tic-tac-toe board on each of the 3 large hearts.
4 – Have fun playing endless games of tic-tac-toe!